Prospero's Books

Without top-down leadership . . .

On self-organizing systems:

"From Cairo to Wall Street, all over the world people are coming together to create change, organizing without top-down leadership or hierarchies."

—Cami Arrow, "The Magic of Co-creation," at Reality Sandwich

Things you wouldn't know . . .

"The planet Saturn has a density lower than water. It would float if placed in water."

—"Real Fact" #728, inside cap of diet Snapple lemon tea purchased at CVS, Southern and 528, Rio Rancho, NM, September 15, 2011

The circle of those whom we do not kill

From Chet Raymo's Science Musings blog, in an essay originally published shortly after the events of September 11, 2001:

It is as Loren Eiseley wrote: "Instability lies at the heart of the world." The criminals who wreaked havoc on New York and Washington were acting out an ancient biological script.

Yet there is ground for hope. Our brains are of sufficient complexity to give rise to that mysterious thing known as self-awareness. Our genes may predispose us to act in certain ways, good or bad, but they do not constrain us. We are effectively free to choose good over evil. Humans alone, of all the things we know about in the universe, can escape the bipolar logic of evolution.

To a cheering extent we have done so. As Margaret Mead pointed out, the circle of those whom we do not kill has steadily expanded throughout human history. The optimists among us imagine that the circle will ultimately embrace the entire planet.

From nature's point of view, there is no such thing as the Problem of Evil: order and disorder, life and death, cooperation and competition are the twin principles of nature's creative force. What humans uniquely face is the Problem of Good: How to create on this tiny planet an oasis of unalloyed peace.

The end that all maps must

On the wonderful Brain Pickings blog, Kirstin Butler reviews the book Everything Sings, by Dennis Wood. The book is an atlas of maps of his North Carolina neighborhood—maps showing everything from the locations of wind chimes to the "highways" squirrels take on telephone and power wires. (Illustrating this post is a map of the distribution of jack-o'-lanterns in 1982. Click to enlarge.)

Butler finishes her review:

Everything Sings may be an antagonist to the traditional practice of cartography, and yet it accomplishes exactly the end that all maps must, if they’re to be of any lasting use: forcing us to see our world, and its many wonders, anew each day.

Turning in the widening gyre

This computer simulation of the formation of a spiral galaxy—such as our own Milky Way—is remarkably like the radar images we've seen in the past two weeks of the growth of Atlantic hurricanes.

As above, so below.

(Title from "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats)

The unity of time

As I've reflected on yesterday's post, it has occurred to me that Aristotle—and the Greek playwrights whose work he discusses—would have agreed with modern physicists that "every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment." That quotation is simply of another way of expressing what Aristotle called the "unity of time."

In Sophocles' Oedipus the King we witness only an hour in the life of Oedipus, but in that hour we learn everything we need to know about his past and likely future. In Joyce's Ulysses we witness only a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, but we learn everything we need to know about their past—and enough to speculate about their future.

 

Implicit in the current moment

"The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the 'now' is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be—but the equations don’t lie."

—Sean Carroll, "Ten Things Everyone Should Know about Time," Discover magazine blog

To learn about love and about the world

One of my fellow Bloomsday tweeters (retelling Joyce's Ulysses in Twitter bursts, over a twenty-four-hour period this past June), Caetano Waldrigues Galindo, writes:

For all of its importance as avant-garde, groundbreaking literature, I am sure (and the older I get, the surer I become) that what keeps us reading Ulysses is its sheer weight as a novel, a weight that can even be adequately measured by standards that were created for the classic novel. Amazing characters, solid psychological work, wisdom (as Harold “no-relation” Bloom would have it), beauty.

Love.

The opposite of hate, as our new “apostle to the gentiles” said at Barney Kiernan’s. That same man who in the beach, at dusk, summarized Dedalus’s concerns about the man and the world by thinking “longest way round is the shortest way home”, because he knew, as all of us know (and as Ulysses has been teaching us for almost a century), that we walk through ourselves always meeting ourselves.

Wisdom.

That’s why I read Ulysses. That’s why I’ve spent the last nine years translating it. To meet me. To learn about love and about the world. To try to touch the reality of the invented lives of Dedalus and the Blooms.

That's pretty much why I keep reading Ulysses too.

The road that takes him to his city

The Grand Lodge of Massachusetts has produced a stunning video—starring MWBro. Benjamin Franklin—introducing Freemasonry.

Hermetic video

Hermeticism is valuable today for (among other things)

• its "big picture" view of the cosmos
• its emphasis on the interconnection of everything
• its metaphoric descriptions of systems, large and small

Two good introductory videos have been created by Christopher Warnock at Renaissance Astrology:

• Hidden Wisdom: the History of Hermeticism
• Hermetic Gnosis & Spiritual Hermeticism